Month: September 2016

In May 2016, Lindsey Schurman, Manager of Client Services at DentalXChange and a representative of the EHG Fund, went to Monrovia, Liberia to attend Full Learning Center’s Conference to see firsthand, the changes and challenges the Full Circle Learning has had to deal with to help that community. She was king enough to write a daily log so we can read about her adventures.

Day 5 – The Final Day

Day 5 began with a power outage at the Full Circle Learning Office. While they attempted to resolve this, Teresa, Beauty, Justin, and I sat over breakfast and discussed the future topics of the day. This was our day to review the conference, its successes, what follow up should occur and areas that can be grown in the next conference. While we passed the time, we talked about different strategies the teachers and schools can use to help get parents involved in the child’s education and how to help children exhibit the “habits of heart” outside of the classroom with items such as homework around the specific trait, pre-school year conferences, a parent university to coincide the students curriculum.

We then went to the Full Circle Learning office and spent the day devising ways to leverage the strengths of this conference over the next year and to plan the next conference, where we could improve on such an already successful program and to further grow the program in Liberia. In August, there will be a training held for an expected 3000 teachers that will grow the program in Liberia from 81 schools to 103 schools. This training will be provided by 72 trained volunteers. There were also an additional 30 people at the conference that aspire to become a trainer. Full Circle Learning has also organized follow up sessions to connect NGOs with teachers to allow for community involvement in schools and assist in the growth of students across Liberia. We received feedback from three schools who were able to come say good bye to us and thank us for our visits and participation.

Everyone involved with the program in Liberia was so appreciative of our attendance and excited for the opportunity to work alongside Teresa!

To learn about more about Lindsey’s trip and how it affected her, please read her post trip interview by clicking here.

In May 2016, Lindsey Schurman, Manager of Client Services atDentalXChange and a representative of the EHG Fund, went to Monrovia, Liberia to attend Full Learning Center’s Conference to see firsthand, the changes and challenges the Full Circle Learning has had to deal with to help that community. She was king enough to write a daily log so we can read about her adventures.

Day 4

We were lucky to start day 4 without rain. This allowed us to visit two schools outside of Monrovia, Korto and New Hope. The schools were about an hour’s drive away. This was not because it was a long distance away but required a large distance of driving over unpaved roads to get to the school. These roads were difficult to drive along and required much care. This is the case for most roads that lead to villages in Liberia. Davidson explained that the road to Korto had been slated for paving multiple times but when it came time to pave the road they were told by the government there was no money.

The school in Korto had planned to do a service project in town this Friday but was unable to due to the weather of the week. This is an area that has faced a great amount of gender based violence and one of the classes had planned a project to go out in to the community to ask about what ways they could do something in the community to prevent it. Instead we were able to visit the classrooms of each grade to meet the students. The school was no bigger than the 2 floors of our office building but there are currently just over 500 students enrolled. Additionally, the principal shared that over 100 students had left over the course of the year due to the inability to afford tuition.

Each class welcomed us and we had the opportunity to see some of the lessons. We entered the preschool class as they practiced their ABC’s, the first grade class as they practiced reading and the twelfth grade class as they spoke about the age of imperialism. We got to speak with teachers from all grade levels during a quick recess and watch the children play.

We then went to New Hope, a school that has remained tuition free to allow students the ability to attend school when they would otherwise be unable to. The director of this school was sick with typhoid at the time and was not able to make it to the school to meet us. Unfortunately when we arrived, school was done for the day but several children remained for the afternoon. Two girls were preparing for a performance on Saturday and we got to see them dance in traditional African outfits. I received a tour of the school from one of the teachers. Each of the classrooms I saw was small with only a few desks; in some cases, 2 or 3 grade levels were taught in the same room. After the tour I was told about what the school had done to assist with learning during the Ebola crisis. At the time, schools, business, government programs, etc. were closed and people were very afraid to go outside and interact due to the easy spread of the disease. It was described as a ghost town. In order to continue educating students that wished to continue learning, this particular school held classes underneath the mango trees just outside the grounds. The classes were so popular students had to be turned away when class size got to big to maintain.

After visiting schools, we drove to central Monrovia where we went to a library run by a program called We Care Liberia. This program and library were started to encourage pleasure reading, which would assist with the literacy problem in Liberia. The program also publishes books by Liberian authors to promote writing from the community. Several students were using the space to study and a volunteer with the library was giving a talk on Early Childhood Development and the necessity of literature in this process.

It was a very enlightening day that ended with pizza in central Monrovia followed by reviewing the newspaper articles that published a review of our conference from the day before with glowing remarks!